Philosophical reflections on perfume and perfumery:
An exploration of aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical, moral, ontological, and phenomenological issues.
Relevant comments are most welcome—whether you agree or disagree!

Friday, November 30, 2012

I
was captivated by the image of Joy
in my mind. After dreaming wistfully about her for years, I finally
decided that it was high time to invite her into my home. I made the
call, and a week or so later, on a crisp, cool fall day, she arrived
at my place. I must say that I was tantalized by the glamorous
demeanor before my eyes. Such a stunning package she presented,
seeming to be everything I had hoped for.

No,
I cannot deny that upon our initial encounter, Joy
seemed quite accurately to reflect the picture which had been painted
for me by others over the course of most my life. Yes, as I gazed at
her amidst all of her trappings, she seemed to me truly to be the
dearest in the world, as I had heard so many claim.... The epitome of
refinement and class, she stood there before me in her gold jewelry
and haute couture wrappings—I felt happy and frankly honored to
have made her acquaintance at last.

But
then it happened: Joy took off her coat, removed her cap,
plopped down on the sofa as though she owned the place and propped up
her mud-covered, dung-encrusted, four-inch chunky heels on the coffee
table. Then, to my surprise and dismay, she opened her mouth and
started to chat. She swore like a sailor, loud and brash. What was
worse: she seemed to be talking for the sake of hearing her own
voice, oblivious to the effect of the volume on anyone who might be
present to hear, including me, her gracious host.

Tolerance
has always been one of my virtues—which is not to boast, but to
state a fact—yet I felt that my patience was being tested by the
presence of this larger-than-life personality who managed somehow to
cast a shadow down upon the ground in all directions at once. What to
do?

Well, as I always say: when life gives you iso-E-super, why
not make niche perfume? After all, you can pour it into attractive
bottles and sell it at 10,000% profit—all that it takes is a
“creative director” wand and a hat!

So,
yes, I figured that I'd simply try to make the best of the situation,
look at it as yet another opportunity for anthropological reflection
on what we have become. How long, after all, could this stare-down
with Joy
really last?

I
began to take note of her mannerisms and compare them to people in my
past whose images were evoked by her, as if she and they were linked
together metaphysically across space and time—among other more
arcane dimensions. This little game, like counting tiles on the
ceiling while reclining in a dentist's chair, did distract me for a
while, but my plan was abruptly disrupted when two strange men
suddenly showed up at my door.

At
first I was taken aback—who could these strangers be? But then I
saw their manner of dress, dirty jeans and sweatshirts, hammer and
wrench-laden tool belts weighting their already low-rise pants down
even further to the point where I found myself mumbling yet again
that so-oft recited rhetorical refrain: Why bother?Why not just go out in your underwear, guys?

Suddenly
it dawned on me who they were. Yes, coincidentally, on the very same
day as Joy's
arrival, I had scheduled the delivery and set-up of my new Samsung
large-screen HDTV. There was no getting around this engagement, so I
steeled myself as best I could, opening the door with a smile and
gesturing them inside after first glancing at their work boots to
make sure that they would not be tracking in any moribund
leaves—or mud or dung.

I
immediately registered the consternation caused to these two young
men by the presence of Joy.
Their faces seemed puzzled, a bit taken aback, not sure exactly how
to react. They hoisted my television to its proper place and set it
up, verifying that it worked in what must have been record time, and
then they bustled to the door and went promptly on their way,
plumber's cracks in tow, no doubt glad, even relieved, to have
escaped Joy's
wrath.Or
was it, rather, that they feared some sort of trap? A snare of
seduction, perhaps?

As
far as they could see, there was no one there but me, so were they
then wary of me rather than her, whom they had no reason to think
might be lurking just below threshold visibility? From their
perspective, if Joy
did not even exist, as far as they could see, then I and I alone was
the cause of what they perceived. Had I, indeed, not laid the trap
for them?

Yes,
if it was true, as it seemed to be—I had gathered from the looks
in their eyes that they were quite anxious to leave—then this was
because they believed that I, and I alone, was implicated in the
clever scheme. They had no idea that she was there, in my house,
invited by me, and let loose to vent her vapors upon them. Was I not,
then, ultimately the cause of their unwitting encounter with Joy?
Was I not, then, as far they were concerned, numerically identical
with Joy?

What,
precisely, did that eccentric woman have in mind?
they seemed to be musing to themselves as they hurried out of the
house and back to their truck, peeling out so rapidly that they
burned tire rubber in the process. The noxious stench of black smoke
now the only trace left behind, in the blink of an eye, the
deliverymen were nowhere in sight, having disappeared forever from
the narrative of my life.

Even
now, years later, I do not know the content of the ideas circulating
about those men's minds on that fated Joy-ful
day. I caught their sideways glances to one another and have often
wondered what it was precisely that they thought. Had they stumbled
upon yet another hoarding cat lady's home, filled with the scent of
used litter and hidden infelicities on rugs under sofas, chairs and,
yes, even beds? They had been given no reason to believe that the
problem had anything to do with Joy
at all. The only person whose presence they registered was mine. I
was the only one whom they could see.

Perhaps
they considered me to be like the woman in her exercise studio
accidentally killed by Alex in A
Clockwork Orange while
trespassing, thus transforming a trivial into a capital crime.
It's true that they were younger than me, and the more I thought
about this little theory, the more plausible it began to seem.

In
my more epistemologically humble moments, I recognize that the
answers to these questions I'll never know. The only thing I have to
go on is my memory of the looks that passed between the two stocky
fellows—padded with both muscle and fat—who had seemed to be so
taken aback, to say the least, by this unexpected encounter with what
they could not have known was really Joy.

Had
I violated norms of acceptable behavior by inviting Joy
into my home and permitting her to stay, effectively giving her
license to take over the space, leaving traces of her blood-red
lipstick on my glasses, clods of dirt on the floor, and a filthy
bathroom to boot? My vexed visitors were long gone, but now, having
in exasperation altogether abandoned my pretensions to armchair
anthropology, I came to the realization that Joy's
visit would have to be curtailed, before anyone stopped by to spend
time with me or dropped by under whatever other pretext.

In
my defense, I must say that I did try for a short time to come up
with a way to make it work, but eventually I detected the scent of
the rotting carrion of a dead mouse in the kitchen, at which point I
had no further choice. I pulled myself together, mustered up the
courage and showed her the door. Yes, I threw her out.

It
wasn't that she violated the four-day house guest rule, smelling like
old fish forgotten in the fridge and unable to recognize that she
did. No, the sad truth is that she had become habituated to her own
odor, what was from day one an off-putting amalgamation of dirty
underwear, sweaty stockings, and old crusty make-up applied from
tubes acquired decades ago. She seemed even to be carrying a huge
corsage of dead flowers in her bag—no doubt from a jilted lover in
her checkered past.

To
my amazement, Joy
managed to produce a roomful of smells strong enough to offend even
some vintage perfume lovers. Yes, I'm talking about those who revel
in the scent of sour, dead floral top notes and wait patiently—dare
I say it? religiously—for
the ecstatic moment hiding somewhere amidst the gooey, gummy drydown.

Joy
was just too much for everyone who came in contact with us—albeit
unbeknownst to them. Enough was enough, I read her the riot act,
packed up her bags and placed them outside on the curb. On the off
chance that she had stolen one of my keys, I even called a locksmith
to change all the bolts, and, yes, cruel though it may seem, I
scrupulously avoided answering her calls for years.

With
time, my memory of Joy's
visit, as of all negative experiences, slowly faded. No longer did
she appear in my mind as a haughty, bawdy harridan, a veritable
hurricane wiping everything and everyone out in her path. Now, with
the benefit of distance and the smell long gone, I began to wonder,
whether I had done her wrong in throwing her out. Did I base that
decision on my own hyperosmia of what only to me seemed to have been
her nauseating concoction of scents?

I
knew from my testing of perfumes such as Frédéric
Malle Musc
Ravageur,
that I was certainly not anosmic to musk, but was I perhaps a bit too
sensitive, too touchy to the scent of Joy—what
would perhaps be truly enjoyable to precisely the sort of person who
revels in Musc
Ravageur
(to say nothing of Serge Lutens Musc
Koublai Khan...).

So,
yes, I had second thoughts about the whole affair, wondering whether
I had blamed her when in fact I was at fault. As the wheels whirred,
my thoughts began to multiply, ultimately culminating in pangs of
compunction, until I could no longer sleep well at night. I had
invited so many other new friends into my home, and none of them had
offended me in the way in which Joy
had, and yet somehow I sensed that what I had done was wrong.

No,
I could not stop myself from agonizing over and over again about who
was ultimately responsible for the debacle that her visit had become.
Was I not in fact the sole author of this clash? Could she really be
blamed for my wishing that she was other than who she was? When I
looked at Joy,
did I want nothing more than to see a reflection of me?

From
there, I began to wonder whether I was not attempting, like the
tyrants of the past, present, and future, to create the world in my
image. Should it really be peopled only with people like me? Anxiety
was now commingling with my long incubated dread of hypocrisy as I
lashed out at myself, crying to no one but the walls and God (or
reasonable facsimile): No, No,
No! How preposterous could something be?!

To calm my frazzled nerves, I
prepared a white porcelain cup of sencha tea, foregoing my usual
afternoon mug of coffee. I stared into the citrine-peridot green
liquid in search of an answer, and at last it emerged, as usual, in
the form of a series of questions:

Did I not need to be a bit
more open to lifestyles and personalities—and scents—very
different from my own? Was I attempting to impose my own values upon
the world, excluding anything which deviated from my parochial notion
of what is good and fine? Did I not need to expand my horizons, look
beyond the little pond in which I lived, like a goldfish bumping up
against the edge of an aquarium while resolutely denying the reality
of anything beyond the glass?

I
concluded, at last, that it was time to invite Joy
back, to see if it was not too late for some form of reconciliation
and damage control. I must confess that I feared, on some level, a
reprisal of what had happened before. To preclude such an unpleasant
possibility, I determined that this time we should meet at a secure,
undisclosed place, where no one who knew us would see—or smell—us
together.

This
rendezvous, up until now, was our little secret: only Joy
and I knew. In some sense, I freely own, the
trial was therefore risk-free. Nonetheless, deeply relieved at the
outcome of this tale, I here openly avow that Joy
did in fact accept my apology, and we have agreed to disagree about
our differences, mutually respecting our divergent perspectives on
the world.

I share my little story now
with you, O Gently Scented Reader, in the hopes that you, too, will
learn from my mistakes.

Friday, November 16, 2012

As a
part of my admittedly quixotic quest for olfactory
omniscience, I have made it my mission to watch every single film
with any perfume or scent reference. (Please leave comments with any
suggestions you may have!) Using perfume as a search term in
my library's database, I recently happened upon an obscure PBS Nova
miniseries episode produced back in 1995. The Mystery of the
Senses: Smell is not a feature-length film but a 56-minute
educational video intended for people like me who are interested in
learning about scent.

Even
knowing all of this, I must confess that I found my thumb hovering
threateningly over the eject button of my DVD player's remote control
as I watched and listened to the cringe-worthy opening of this
production. The text is narrated by Diane Ackerman, author of The
Natural History of the Senses, in a truly annoying tone befitting
of a junior high school biology teacher. For your pleasure, I provide
the text and a few images from the opening scene:

We're
about to embark on a journey through the world of smell. And we're
going to start at the Statue of Liberty, of all
places, where a real smell-celebration is in
full swing.

The
fireworks are for Champagne, a new Yves Saint
Laurent perfume.

This
is Champagne's gala coming out party—the perfume, not the drink.

It's amazing how much sensing happens at a snazzy shindig in the dark. There's lots of conversations to hear, and sights to see, and there's plenty of tasting ... to work off. There's touch.

This is a fabulous
party,

and all for the sake of a smell!

That
should suffice. You always know that what you're watching is really lame when your eyes shunt back and forth between the minute counter clock on the DVD
player and the screen. Nonetheless, I decided to stick it out. How
bad could it really be? I asked myself as I calculated the
remaining 53 minutes left to endure. In the end, I was very happy to
have invested just under an hour of my life to learn what I learned
from this film.

It
wasn't watching male cockroaches attempt to copulate with a rod just
dipped in female cockroach hormones which redeemed The Mystery of
the Senses: Smell. (Sorry: no screen shots, as I have a deep fear
and loathing of insects and also prefer not to draw entomologist
traffic to this site. Porn enthusiasts already flock here in search of “group orgy”, “prostitutes”, and
the like. Believe it or not, such search terms bring more new
visitors to the salon de parfum than even “Luca Turindivorce”!)

Nor
was I especially smitten with the smart scene where Ms. Ackerman, in her bright red dress and facial foundation two shades too light, sashays into a steam room and does a quick twirl toward the camera amidst
several hairy-chested, virile-looking, towel-clad men to proclaim,
after drawing a deep breath through her nostrils:

It really does
smell good in here!

Nor
was I particularly impressed by the scuba diving clip in which Ms.
Ackerman dodges sharks while she
explains, with increasingly irritating and inappropriate voice
inflections (anyone who has ever listened to AM radio knows what I am
talking about...) in a didactic and corny narration along the lines
of the above, that undersea creatures such as the lobster which she brings up to eat for lunch are capable of navigating their course
underwater by following scent trails.

I felt that the segment on drug-sniffing dogs working for the Feds at
an airport and a shipping dock could have been edited out without loss since on the day of the filming the dogs found nothing, making it all
seem rather anti-climactic, especially given the suspenseful musical score playing in the background.

An
olfactory scientist's ability to literally wave his nose back and
forth over the opening of a Chanel
no 5 perfume bottle was, I own, mildly amusing. He
apparently has extra muscles in his nose or has somehow trained it to move as though it had joints!

But
the undeniable highlights of this film are three. First, the segment
featuring a perky little sow on the hunt for truffles, which—I had
no idea before this viewing—are sought because they happen to bear
the scent of boar musk within them!

Yes, believe it or not, female pigs burrow into the ground to dig out truffles because they believe themselves to be finding a mate! What a revelation. I honestly had no idea.

A friendly French farmer preparing a truffle omelette slyly confides with slanted eyes that truffles have aphrodisiac effects upon human beings as well! Ooh, là, là!

All of this excitement and talk of pheromones naturally got me thinking about the possibly biological basis of the age-old “Cats
or Dogs” dichotomy. Perhaps it really does come down, in the end, to pheromone
receptors! The people who dislike cats often love dogs, and vice
versa. Some people, of course, go both ways.

The second big eyeopener of this little film involved a visit to a factory where fragrances are produced. I have often referred to “vat-produced chemical soup” in my negative reviews of what I find to be unwearable fragrances (not worthy of the name perfume...), and in The Mystery of the Senses: Smell, all of my suspicions were confirmed about the various kinds of errors which may arise when factory workers mix together perfumes in large vats.

Ever
wonder about batch variations? The nearly infinite possibilities for
mistakes are revealed in a few snapshots of the inside of one of the
places where fragrances are produced in bulk volumes. All it would
take would be one tiny error: a mix-up on the tank, the spigot
number, the measurement line for the proper amount to add, a distracting cellphone call, a
foreman's illegible scrawl...

After this incredibly insightful look at the inside of one of these
fragrance factories, I realized that it's very nearly a miracle
that any two different batches ever smell anything alike!

Small
wonder that big perfume houses feel that they can reformulate with impunity. Mistakes
are and can only be made! Oh well.

The
third, and by far most important part of this educational film, for
perfumistas, is the rare glimpse which it offers into the
behind-the-scenes workings at International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF).

Viewers are treated to such exquisite sights as a perfumer and his
manager arguing animatedly over a toilet about whether a new cleaning
scent contains too much pine—and (because the manager thinks that
it does) what to do about it.

Again,
a perfumer and his supervisor hover over a freshly shampooed head,
which, they come to agree, smells too sophisticated, too floral, and
needs more fruit to be able to appeal to younger consumers!

So there
you have it, my fragrant friends: the ultimate source of the
fruity-floral tsunami of fragrances being put out today. These
supervisors and managers working behind the scenes at IFF—and
elsewhere, I presume—are requiring perfumers to modify their
creations to fit prior shared conceptions of what toilets and young
women should smell like!

La
crème de
la crème
of The Mystery of the Senses: Smell
is without question the portion devoted to perfumer Sophia Grojsman
as she struggles to compose a perfume which will please fellow
perfumer Ann Gottlieb who, rather than working as a perfumer, wears
the client's hat, as she is representing the company for whom
Grojsman has been enlisted to produce the perfume on behalf of IFF.

Grojsman
expresses manifest frustration at having been asked by her employer
to produce a men's fragrance, given that she specializes in women's
floral accords. She also complains at one point that the powers that
be at IFF have decided that she works better under pressure, so now
they all “step on my neck”!

That what Grojsman says is indeed true becomes clear in the scene in which she and Gottlieb face off over Grojsman's fragrance submission. Gottlieb has the power in this relationship, representing as she does the company who will have the final say on whether Grojsman's new composition will be launched as a perfume.

Gottlieb complains that
Grojsman's fragrance needs a fresher top note, and she provides a
liquid example of what, as she puts it, “we'd like to see built
into your submission.”

All
of this takes place on Friday afternoon. The group comprises
representatives from both sides: the client, led by Gottlieb; and
IFF, with Sophia Grojsman as the target of criticism for having
produced a perfume (gasp!) unacceptable to Gottlieb! The group
decides to reconvene to evaluate Grojsman's modified submission on
Monday afternoon at 2pm. The Friday meeting is thus adjourned and,
from there, presumably all of the bureaucrats and Tzar Gottlieb go
home to enjoy the weekend.

Meanwhile, Grojsman toils away nonstop in her laboratory, assistants by her side, attempting to produce Gottlieb's desired fragrance by the looming deadline.

Grojsman's weekend struggle is ultimately for naught, as the fragrance is rejected and the formula relegated to the vault of perfumes composed but never launched, an official failure. Why?

Because the client rejected what Grojsman produced for having failed to be what the client wanted it to be.

Discussion

In
The Mystery of the Senses: Smell, Gottlieb comes off looking like
something of a villain, towering over Grojsman and browbeating her
into producing what Gottlieb wishes to smell. Given this derogatory
depiction, I feel obliged to observe here that I
myself am in fact a fan of perfumer Ann Gottlieb, who was the nose
behind two quite original creations: Sarah Jessica Parker Covet,
a bizarre lavender-chocolate fougère,
and Calvin Klein Contradiction,
an oddly indescribable and equally appealing
eucalyptus-fruity-oriental perfume. Both of these compositions are
admired and even loved by me and, perhaps precisely for their sheer
eccentricity, both have been discontinued. Gottlieb created these
innovative and challenging perfumes and obviously had the gumption to
stand up to her clients. Covet
and Contradiction,
albeit now discontinued, were in fact launched. Alas, these perfumes fell prey to the tyranny of the market, to whom the companies which produced them are beholden. Businesses, lest anyone forget, are intrinsically profit-seeking entities.

In
the scene in which Gottlieb appears in The Mystery
of the Senses: Smell, she is the boss,
exerting near tyrannical power over Grojsman, whom many, however,
regard as a better perfumer. Certainly, Grojsman's résumé boasts
far more success stories: Estée Lauder White
Linen and Beautiful,
Calvin Klein Eternity,
Yves Saint Laurent Paris and
Yvresse
(originally launched as Champagne,
the perfume being celebrated at the opening of this production),
Lancôme Trésor,
Bvlgari Bvlgari pour Femme.
The list of Sophia Grojsman-designed bestselling perfumes literally
goes on and on and on...

I must reiterate that the face-off between Gottlieb and Grojsman presented
in this video was very surprising to me, as I have always regarded Sophia
Grojsman as the perfume artist par
excellence, if any perfumer is an
artist at all. That is, in effect, the question pointedly raised by
The Mystery of the Senses: Smell,
and it makes the short film well worth any perfumista's time to see
the reality of what perfumers are doing when they agree to work for
clients who have the final say on whether a new creation makes the
grade, deserves to be launched and therefore exist.

The
fact that Ann Gottlieb, a considerably less well-known and less
well-regarded perfumer than Sophia Grojsman should be able to issue a fate-sealing judgment on one of Grojsman's creations constitutes a serious reality check
for those who persist in insisting that perfumery is an art. Watch
this film, please, if you can find a copy somewhere—anywhere—and
then ask yourself whether the kind of pressure under which Grojsman
is placed, forced to modify her creative output to reflect the values
of other people—and ultimately to please their, not her tastes—can
properly be considered artistic creation. To me, this little film
provides an iron-clad, definitive proof of what Bryan Ross over at From Pyrgos has been saying all along:

What
all of the perfumers at IFF are doing—whether they work in the
toilet bowl cleaner area or around the shampoo sinks or in an
elaborate workshop such as Sophia Grojsman's, where iconic perfumes
are born—is the same. Yes, scents for toilet bowl cleaners and shampoos are created in the same way, with negotiations and
concessions being made by clients and contracted perfumers. Should we say, then, that all
of the perfumers working at IFF are artists?

One
thing is clear: if the word artist is to mean anything, then it
must delineate a contrast class. The question becomes: who are the
non-artists among all perfumers? If, as Chandler Burr ("The Curator") suggested in an interview for a piece at the Daily Beastregarding his new "olfactory art" exhibit (at the Museum of Arts and Design), even the person who created the scent for Coppertone suntan lotion is
an artist, then it starts to sound as though anyone who produces new
scents is automatically an artist. In the case of this naïve—or
ignorant, if you like—use of artist as an emotive form of
approbation, the term simply refers to anyone who produces something
which we appreciate. What many in the "perfumery is art" camp fail to grasp is that the question of whether perfumery is art is not a question about whether perfume is a good or worthy thing. It is, rather, a conceptual question.

If
every perfumer is an artist, then why not every chef and gardener and
wine producer? Are candle and soap makers and bakers also artists in
this sense? Well, then why not everyone else who does anything else
we value, too? Why not farmers, civil engineers, school teachers, and
heads of state? All of these people apply their intellect to generate
creative solutions and reach certain goals: crop rotation, irrigation systems,
interdisciplinary classroom curricula, five-year plans. Are these all
supposed to be artworks, too?

We
should not blind ourselves to the implications of this sort of
promiscuous application of the term artist to everyone and his
mother, brother, sister, father, cousin, niece and nephew.... In the
end, if everyone is an artist, then no one is an artist. The label
has been evacuated of all meaning. Why not, then, simply honor the perfumers who
excel at their trade by identifying them as “great”?

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Blonde
was a bimbo, no one can deny, but she stole many hearts all the same.
The moment she entered a room, she'd strut her stuff, swinging left,
right, left... swaying just a bit forward on the ball of her feet,
and then back on her heels. Her hip bones would jut as she shifted
her weight from side to side, sniffing like a supermodel, tell-tale
white powder residues lightly dusting the tip of her nose. No one
could fail to take note when Blonde arrived: her reputation,
as her scent, preceded her by miles.

There
were those of course who called her a slut,
but what they really begrudged her was that she had left them in a
rut, which they themselves had dug, having misconstrued the nature of
their short-lived relation and come to believe that she was The One.
They fervently clung to the image of their construction, mistaking it
for an oasis, a veritable heaven on earth, illuminated by the light
which they had finally seen, an unmistakable sign of the divine, a
halo seemingly cast by the whites of her eyes! Where silence had
reigned, now the sweet song of paradise was being sung by sprites,
who had been hiding for so long and somehow sprung up all at once as
though beckoned by Blonde—or
so it seemed at the time.

Until,
that is, the mirage vaporized before them, like drops of water from a
sprinkler on a black asphalt street in the blazing heat of a late
summer's day. Yes, she left them while they were still reeling,
enraptured in the sweet throes of passion, still basking in the warm
glow of desire, having discovered—or so they thought—that she was
precisely what they had sought all along. At last, their knit-picking
rejection of more orthodox, kind kinds—too boring, too plain, too
conforming, too small-minded, and probably dumb. Not enough leg or
breast, or too much of both, and certainly not good enough for them.

None
of this could, in truth, be said of Blonde.
Defying stereotypes at every turn, Blonde
was as smart as they come. Those who set their sights on her could
only aspire to capture this beguiling wonder, unaware that she was
really Medusa in disguise.... No, it seemed to them, the wait was
over, the search complete. These would-have-been suitors had all been
seduced to believe that she, too, thought that they were The One.
That somehow, miraculously, the planets had been aligned just right
for the very first time, so that the only person whom they had ever
found to be worthy of their esteem felt precisely the same way about
them, and to the same degree.

One
after the other, they began planning in their mind the home which
they would fashion of a house, with Blonde
by their side, little munchkins and dogs playing outside on the
grassy green lawn in the backyard on warm sunny afternoons in a rural
area of up-state New York. Manhattan was no place to raise a family,
though they'd continue to commute there occasionally to make business
connections and perhaps some weekend shopping trips to Dean &
Deluca, Henri Bendel, Bloomingdales, and the like.

They
imagined Blonde in a
lush pink velour bathrobe baking croissants and brewing up mugs of
dark-roasted Green Mountain coffee each morning in a kitchen
shimmering with shiny silver appliances somehow magically rendered
fingerprint-free. Sunlight would stream into the dining room through
the shutters and blinds hanging before big bay windows, the whole
place most tastefully decorated in purple and teal. There'd be a wine
cellar and a sauna; a library and a music room; everything they
needed would be right there within reach. As more and more gadgets
and things were added to their ever-lengthening acquisitions list,
their dreams became filled with ornate details of how what had begun
as a romantic tryst would be seamlessly transformed into a model of
marital bliss.

Alas,
Blonde did not play
the monogamy game. No, Blonde,
unlike those who chose and chased her, was free. Free to
leave, they all learned one way or the other, sooner rather than
later. She left them all, one by one, they were serially discarded,
like used haute couture
dresses worn once for show and then no, not sold or put up for
auction: she never deigned to stoop so low. Blonde
donated her once-worn clothes—her silk scarves and jewel-encrusted
sheaths, dead animal skins with the heads still attached, pairs of
crocodile shoes and python bags dyed to match—to this or that
charitable cause (presumably not PETA), where naturally the stuff was
pilfered by bureaucrats, much like the CEOs of NGOs who drive
Mercedes and pose as altruists while the people doing all of the work
are volunteers.

Blonde
was oblivious to all of this. It wasn't that they fooled her but that
she really didn't care. She did not need those discarded things
anymore, and what became of them was no matter for her concern. Never
one to judge, Blonde
was far above the petit bourgeois
fray, their endless moralizing chatter, their pathetic excuse for a
life. Blonde, unlike
them, was not molded by the mercurial forces of capitalism bearing
down from all sides. She knew what she wanted and got what she needed
and no one would—or could—stand in her way.

Blonde
was tough and mean, making her break cold and clean when it came time
to leave, never turning back, never offering excuses or explanations,
never even saying goodbye, and certainly never suffering compunction
or guilt for what she had done. Why? Because she never lied.

Blonde
was a bimbo, no one can truly deny. And though she had many critics
and naysayers, the deep, dark secret was betrayed by the slight
twitch at the corners of their eyes, the quiver of their lip, even as
they condemned her in the harshest of terms, the hair raised on their
forearms, their inability not to shiver just a bit each time that her
memory flittered to the forefront of their mind, a jumbled collection
of emotions welling up inside as they attempted yet again to sort out
the source of their short-lived relation's demise.

The
truth was that they all wanted in their heart of hearts nothing more
than to be just like her. She was the image of what they had never
become, not for their strength, but because they were weak. They were
forever shackled by the manacles which they had created and attached
to their wrists precisely in order to protect themselves from their
very own beliefs. Trapped in prisons of their own making, after so
many years of pandering to please others, their feet were planted to
the mud-encrusted floor of dark caves of delusion, having come to
believe even the lies which they had devised to fool the others with
the paltry aim of achieving the trivial objects of their desire. As
time progressed, they became anchored, and then began to sink ever
deeper as though into quicksand, their life dwindling away, as their
once abundant reserves of energy were steadily, inexorably depleted.

She
was free, what they would never be, and though they might grow old
and wrinkly and gray, outlasting her by decades, the price they paid
for the very scrupulousness of their prudence was the failed promise
of what they might have been, what they never became, and all of the
things which they wanted to do but never did. Blonde
lived fast and furiously and though she is physically now a part of
the past, her memory lives on, lingering in the minds of all those
fortunate enough to behold one of the few creatures ever to have been
totally free, what her detractors and jilted suitors will never be.

Blonde
died young, but no one can say that she did not lead a richer, more
beautiful life than those who survived to tell tall tales, regaling
alleged events said to precede her departure, directing all of their
energy and intellect to dismantling her legacy through libel and
slander which would have made her scoff and perhaps does as she gazes
down haughtily from the heavens, knowing full well the cause of these
sorry slobs' ressentiment, and
the true reason for all of their lies.

Blonde
was a bimbo, no one can deny, but she, unlike the others, chose what
she had become and never regretted a single thing that she had done,
having lived each day as though it were her last, They, in contrast,
saved up small change to buy RVs and ugly condominiums in south
Florida, waiting until they were too old to enjoy their remaining
time, like all of the wage slaves before them who had squandered the
best years of their lives only to sit, bored, playing Bingo and
Sudoko, dead skin cells flaking from their decrepit bodies while they
waited to die.

An
epicurean through and through, Blonde
was acutely aware that we're all going to die, which was precisely
why she conducted herself in the manner in which she did. She refused
to squander her precious time on lost causes, utter nonsense
attempting to please others who might or might not appreciate who she
was or anything she ever did or tried to do. Blonde
lived her life for herself, no one else, like a cat, and that was
both the secret to her greatness, and the best explanation for the
disparity between who she really was and what her rancorous,
regret-ridden survivors now say.